


Safecrackers

by Nevcolleil



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - White Collar Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 13:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21446683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: A brush with death during his days as a Delta Ranger torpedoed Jack Dalton's prospects as a counterintelligence agent before they were even realized, but that's perhaps for the best.If Jack had been off galivanting across the globe playing James Bond, he couldn't have been there for his baby, his stepdaughter Riley... the most important person in Jack's life, never mind that things didn't quite work out with Jack and Riley's momma.And who knows what another FBI agent might have done the day "Mac" - the beautifully brilliant (and, honestly, just plain beautiful) conman Jack's been chasing for a while now - hands himself over to authorities.What Jack does... isn't, strictly speaking, a wise idea.But if Mac doesn't end up getting one or the both of them killed or arrested... it just might be the best idea Jack's ever had.
Relationships: Jack Dalton/Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	Safecrackers

**Author's Note:**

> I am no less notoriously terrible at progressing my works-in-progress... or finishing them up. But I don't seem to learn from my own failures! So I'm posting this little bit of this idea that keeps coming back to me in various forms. If you like it, please let me know. Your encouragement could fuel further development of this universe!

It’s been years since Jack’s had what he would call a really _bad_ day.

Granted, what Jack would call a really “bad” day would send most people - with their everyday complaints about their hair or the weather, or about stubbing a toe really hard or misplacing their keys - sobbing into a corner.

But today - today, Jack’s had a really bad day...

Had-to-leave-work-early-to-keep-from-ripping-off-his-own-leg-and-beating-a-probie-with-it bad. Failing-to-work-that-exact-amputee-joke-into-conversation-to-vent-a-little bad (Jack loves amputee humor.)

Jack comes home with a headache like an actual barndoor overheard him telling his latest sorry excuse for a partner that the kid couldn’t hit one with a helicopter - and hit Jack over the back of the head for making the suggestion.

He’s worn a coffee-stained tie since ten a.m. this morning because Ralphie put too much fucking sugar into the coffee pot again - yes, directly into the _pot_, the sociopath - and Jack’s body rejected it on principle alone. Also again because Des had apparently stolen Jack’s last backup tie and hopefully worn it. (Jack doesn’t know that Des’s klepto streak and the rumor that she and Jill like to get up to kinky stuff in those empty offices up on the third floor of the building, when they’re all in the middle of a long case and nobody has a lot of time to go home for trysts, are related - but he doesn’t _not_ know it either.)

The leg’s been bothering him all day - hence the headache - courtesy of the four block run a suspect had given him yesterday (for _nothing_, since Pearson hadn’t done his part and the asshole had gotten away.) And standing in line at the grocery store for entirely too long - stuck behind three, _three_, mind you, fools who either couldn’t read the ‘15 Items Only’ sign lit above the register - or ignored it as well as Jack’s glare - hadn’t done Jack any favors.

Plus Jack spent the entire drive home from the Bureau on the phone, trying to talk some sense into his ex-wife - per his daughter’s wishes, thank you - because Diane’s gone and gotten it into her head that giving Elwood, Riley’s biological father, a sixty-secondth chance is somehow not a terribly rotten idea.

And then there’s that other thing.

But Jack’s foul mood has nothing to do with that.

The one bright spot to Jack’s day is that when he gets home, his little girl is already there - not that she often isn’t, since she moved out to L.A. and in with him. Or that “little girl” applies to Riley Davis, premiere event planner, as anything but a nostalgic term of endearment. Riley’s a grown woman now. A successful professional event coordinator. Probably - no, pretty definitely - a healthier example of a grown, professional adult than Jack, when it comes to anything besides catching bad guys.

And she’s sitting on Jack’s couch when he gets home with her hair pulled up in a sloppy bun, wearing a faded pair of pj’s and a pair of fuzzy socks so fuzzy her feet look more like little puffs of pink at the ends of her legs than feet, and attacking a bowl of cocoa puffs the size of her own head.

“You’we hobe erby,” she mumbles around a mouthful of cocoa puffs, cheeks swollen with cereal and milk glistening at the corners of her lips. 

The day evaporates as if it never was, and Jack grins.

“Noticed we were running a little low on sodium and-” Jack shifts both his canvas grocery bags onto the arm also holding his briefcase, freeing one hand to reach into the fullest bag and pull out one of the cardboard boxes inside. “-pyridoxine hydochloride,” Jack reads from the box with an exaggerated squint, purposefully butchering the pronunciation. “Couldn’t let my baby girl go twenty-four hours without her daily 36 gram intake of sugar.”

Riley narrows her eyes at him over her - mostly empty now - bowl of cocoa-colored milk and gives Jack a _very_ un-baby-like hand gesture.

Jack laughs, and despite a little more eye-narrowing, Riley laughs with him. He tosses the box in her general direction - and Riley shifts smoothly to let it land on the couch cushion beside her - as he heads for the kitchen of the cosy ranchstyle he bought when the Bureau first transferred him here to the LA office.

“Shut up,” she calls to him. “A girl needs a little-” and the sound of more shifting tells Jack she’s reading from the box as well, “-riboflavin to pick her up in the morning.”

“Or five o’clock in the evenin’,” Jack says.

“Then too.”

“Well, come help your old man put all this riboflavin up, and I’ll cook us a steak chaser to your cocoa puffs. How ‘bout that?”

By the time Jack’s prepped and grilled a nice sirloin and sipped a couple of cold ones, chatting and laughing with Riley out on the deck, where the barbecue pit is, he’s all but forgotten... that other thing. (Mostly.)

But of course Riley hasn’t missed- Whatever it is that always tells her when Jack’s got something stuck in his craw - he’ll be damned if he’s got any kind of tell.

“You sure you don’t wanna take care of that now,” she asks easily, between sips of sweet tea. 

While Jack grilled, Riley peeled and cooked some potatoes with a little butter and onion and steamed some broccoli. She fixed their plates and brought them out here, onto Jack’s deck while Jack got a fire going. They ate their meals fire-side like they do a lot when the weather’s willing - another day-brightener Jack indulges in as much as possible: sharing a meal with his Riles. 

Jack’s plate sits at his feet on the deck, but the dishes aren’t what Riley is referring to.

“Naw,” Jack says just as easily - which is kind of a feat, if Jack thinks about it (which he doesn’t, as much as possible.) “I’ll be off t’ bed soon enough, and once I’ve got it off I’m gonna wanna crash,” he says, when once he would have pretended not to understand why she’d even ask.

Riley beams at him for a moment. Just a moment - a glimmer in her eyes, a curl of her lips and then it’s gone - but Jack sees it and is sure he flushes.

Jack clears his throat and lifts his Michelob Gold, swirling the golden liquid inside as he says, “Just gonna finish my beer, then I’m _done_.”

Of _course_ Riley only asked to distract him. 

There’s not a hint of hesitation in her voice when she says, “You did everything you could, you know. You told him what would happen if he came back to the States, Jack. You told him.”

Of course Riley remembers how Jack let slip - once, like, two weeks ago - what would be happening today.

“I did not,” Jack says as neutrally as he can - with his best ‘Who? _Me_?’ expression on his face, “as a federal agent discourage a suspected thief from rendering himself into federal custody.” He points at Riley with his bottle, and the beer inside swirls again, this time without his volition. 

There’s a slight tremor in Jack’s hand that he can’t quite get a handle of suddenly.

“_Everything_, Jack,” Riley insists, eyes serious and focus on him with that laser focus Jack’s always secretly thought would serve her well in law enforcement (if anybody ever murdered him and went over his dead body to lure her into that line of work.) “More than anyone else would have done.”

“Yeah, well...” Jack says uncomfortably, shifting his gaze to the slowly dying fire. Then back away because the symbolism is a little much for him tonight. “For all the good it did.”

“That’s on _him_, Jack. Not you.”

‘Not on him either,’ Jack wants to say, wants to believe. But it had been Mac’s choice, after all.

No one had forced him to go to the storage unit in San Francisco the LA office had been tipped off about... He’d gone there on purpose, of his own free will. For _Nikki_. 

For Nikki fucking Carpenter, of all the- Not that Jack would feel any better right now if Harry MacKenzie had thrown his life away for any other woman - for any other _person_, Jack corrects himself in his own mind.

“He’s a goddamned kid,” Jack says roughly, before tilting back his head and emptying his last bottle. He sets it down next to his empty plate with a care that belies the churning feeling going on inside of him. 

MacKenzie- _Mac_, the kid insisted Jack call him, the first time they met... The first time they met when Jack knew who he was meeting. Mac recieved a sentence of twenty-five years in federal prison today. 

Twenty-five _years_.

A mercy, considering everything that Mac’s done, all the crimes he’s committed or abetted someone else in committing - all the crimes he’s _allegedly_ committed. But still-

Mac is barely older than Riley, as uncomfortable as that fact makes Jack if he thinks about it (which he doesn’t... ever.) 

“I thought you said he’s some kind of genius,” Riley says.

And Mac is. A genius kid, barely older than Riley, smart as a mechanized whip and with a smile as dangerous as one. And he’s going to be spending maybe that whole twenty-five years behind bars, those smarts and that smile growing bitter and brittle from disuse.

Jack feels abruptly like he could be sick.

“Yeah, well... Even geniuses get stupid sometimes,” he says, praying that Riley says nothing too on-the-nose about Jack on the same subject.

Riley doesn’t say anything for a long moment... and Jack relaxes.

“Well, Mac for one doesn’t seem to be letting it get him down,” she eventually remarks.

Which makes absolutely no sense at first, until Jack looks over and sees that she’s holding a simple, striped post card in one hand.

No. Not striped... Doodled on. Each black ink line handrawn onto the postcard’s front is shaded along either edge, giving the impression not of stripes but of uniform, rounded pipes...

Or bars.

Jack reaches out on autopilot when Riley holds the post card out to him without a word, and the stomach that had churned before threatens to drop on Jack completely.

Jack’s been getting the cards for years. For as long as he’s been chasing Harry MacKenzie - chasing _Mac_. Christmas cards and birthday cards... the occasional thank you for taking one of Mac’s “less honorable contemporaries” off the street. (That’s what Mac actually calls them, the nerd.)

Once - only once - an apology.

Jack stares down at the handrawn prison bars - much like the ones Jack doomed Mac to wither behind when he slapped those cuffs on the boy outside the storage facility where they’d discovered Nikki Carpenter’s San Francisco stash.

He’d been too angry then to say the words he feels now. Silly and sentimental though they are... And he doubts that sentiment will be the one that Mac expressed on his card this time. The post card trembles in Jack’s hands as he considers what he’ll see instead.

Another few bars of some old song? Lines from a poem in one language or another... but not something cheerful or funny or informative, not this time. Something sure to cut Jack to the quick. Something accusatory or mocking or mean.

No more “fun facts” about the science behind whatever device Mac had rigged up this time to help him pull off his heist.

No more weirdly friendly, even flirtatious, messages “just checking in on my favorite federal agent.”

No more talking about his day, as if all international con men and thieves talk about their daily activities with the lead investigator tracking their movements. No more teasing Jack with stupid jokes and silly riddles.

Maybe the back of the post card will even be blank? That’s what Jack became about a moment after he stopped being angry

“I _couldn’t_ let Nikki show up, Ja- Agent Dalton... I couldn’t. I’m sorry. Listen to me. Really, I-” Mac had babbled over and over as Jack led him through the storage facility, manuevering him roughly with a harsh hand on one shoulder, Mac’s long blond hair brushing softly against the backs of Jack’s knuckles, around storage units and to the waiting horde of fellow agents who’d gathered by then outside.

Jack had heard that almost-slip. That single syllable of his name - heard the note of pleading in Mac’s voice. Not to be released... but for Jack’s understanding, his forgiveness. Jack had felt the eyes of the other members of his team burning through the back of his head as they’d all heard, and Jack just went blank.

He turns over the card.

‘_What’s an inmate’s favorite place to hang out?_’ is written in the center of the card in Mac’s neat print.

‘_At the bars_.’ Mac wrote just beneath that.

Jack laughs out loud, just once - a quick, probably too-wet, punch of laughter, and then he growls in frustration, wiping at the corners of his eyes.

“This kid is a goddamned lunatic,” he says to Riley, not looking at her. 

For a moment, all caught up in how _cut up_ one stupid piece of cardstock could make him feel, Jack had almost forgotten she was watching him.

“No wonder you like him so much,” Riley says, making Jack look at her sharply at last.

But there’s no more censure in her face, her eyes or smile than there was in her voice, and for the second time today Jack feels renewed and redeemed.

Jack sighs, releasing tension and a quieter - but equally wet - version of that nearly hysterical laughter from the moment before.

“I really do,” he admits out loud, for the first time ever.

“I know, Jack,” Riley says softly, quietly acknowledging Jack’s grief - which, with Riley sitting there looking at him like that, so compassionate and understanding, Jack can no longer pretend hasn’t been the worst part of just about the worst day Jack’s been through since he made peace with the leg.

One day into Mac’s potentially-twenty-five-year-long prison sentence, there isn’t anything else for either of them to say about the subject.

And won’t be... until Mac’s served at least long enough to qualify for parole. Without trying to break out of the joint in the meantime.

Or... until something equally unlikely happens.

(Eighteen months later a US Treasury vault blows up with some very interesting evidence left inside.)

(That definitely qualifies as “unlikely”.)


End file.
